SOURCE: "Sketches by Boz," in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, edited by John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 19-34.

In the following essay, Browning depicts Sketches by Boz as a realistic account of early Victorian England.

Writing To John Forster from Lausanne in 1846, Dickens declared that he found it difficult to write fast when away from London:

I suppose this is partly the effect of two years' ease, and partly of the absence of streets and numbers of figures. I can't express how much I want these. It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose. For a week or fortnight I can write prodigiously in a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without...